The spellbook ofAstrology

On the night road out of Mohenjo-Daro the camels scream before Ravi sees the jackal-headed raider slipping between the bales. The old astrologer lifts two fingers toward the brightest star and a thread of pale blue fire leaps from them, crossing the thirty feet of sand in a blink. The Andaman twists aside at the last instant, so the bolt only scorches a smoking furrow across his shoulder instead of taking him full in the chest. He runs anyway. Ravi lets him go, rubbing his tingling fingers, wishing his reach were a few years longer.

The fisherman's widow waits on the roof of the Acheron Institute of Astrology while Meritamun reads the sky over the Great Canal. She has asked about one person only: her son, who shipped out with a Tartessian trader in the spring. Near midnight the astrologer lowers her eyes from the stars and chooses her words with care. The boy lives, but he is in grave danger, and he is very far away. Then, because the mother is still gripping her sleeve, she points south and west, past the lighthouse, toward the open sea.

Pello the charlatan has been promised seven genuine charms of protection for the price of five, and the stallholder at the Sea Nymph Bazaar is sweating in a way Pello recognizes from his own mirror. He mutters a few words, squints, and for one short minute the table in front of him is laid bare to his eye. One amulet, a chipped blue scarab, glows with a faint, true enchantment. The other six are painted clay. Pello buys the scarab alone, pays for it in full, and winks on his way out.

Before the dice come out at the Inn of the Crimson Moon, young Castor sidles up to the astrologer in the corner and slides a silver piece across the table. Chloris touches his forehead and murmurs to the sky beyond the smoky rafters. Nothing flashes. Nothing sings. All evening Castor simply wins a little more than he loses, and when a sour-faced rival mutters a hex over his cup, the ill-wish slides off him like rain from oilcloth. By tomorrow's dusk the blessing will be gone. Tonight he orders another round.

Deep in the Black Forest the path narrows between mossy oaks, and Anwen the mage traces the ram's horns on her palm before going on. The spell tells her nothing about what waits ahead. It only wakes her. So when the goblins drop from the branches with a shriek, she is already moving, stepping back from the first blade and dragging her apprentice down behind a root while the others are still gaping. The ambush meant to catch them flat-footed finds her turned and ready, and the goblins falter.

The harbor watch at Tartessos keeps a brazier burning on the breakwater, and tonight that is a problem. Hiram, an astrologer with debts to pay, crouches in a skiff below the rocks and shapes a sphere of perfect darkness around the fire, twenty feet across. The flames still crackle, but inside the black ball they give no light at all. The guard fumbles for a torch; it is as useless as the brazier. Three low boats slide past into the inner harbor, and the darkness will hold for hours yet.

The goblin tunnels beneath the Rhiphaen Mountains stink of smoke and old bones. Sethra, a Druas mage hired by the dwarves of Ironhold, whispers to the sun she cannot see and sets a spark no bigger than a pea on the tip of her staff. It blazes outward, lighting the passage forty feet in every direction. From around the next bend comes a chorus of yelps. The goblins who hate the sun hate this nearly as much, and they scramble back into the dark, shielding their eyes.

The bronze bell of the fishermen's shrine in Vaca vanished overnight, and the old keeper describes it in loving detail: the green bloom on the rim, the dent from a storm, the rope of braided bark. Tupac the astrologer listens, closes his eyes, and then begins to walk. He turns through the public market like a compass needle, ignoring the stalls, and within the hour he is standing outside a smith's back door, where the pull in his mind abruptly stops. Inside, someone has just lit the forge.

The clay tablet came out of a First Age ruin on the Plain of Gwyddneu wrapped in three layers of oiled silk, and the Atlantis Historical Society has paid well for a reading. The astrologer Melanthe lays her hand on it, speaks to the stars, and the crowded, alien marks settle into meaning one line at a time. The room holds its breath. She reads it aloud, slowly, then reads it again. It is a receipt for forty jars of olive oil, a quantity of salted fish, and a disputed goat.

The harbormaster of Gadirea has never waived a fee in thirty years, and the mage Theron is not about to pay one he cannot afford. He traces the twins in the air behind his ledger and waits. The harbormaster frowns, blinks, and then, to the astonishment of his clerks, stamps the papers free of charge and presses a fig into Theron's hand for the road. An hour later, pacing his office, the old miser still cannot understand what came over him.

When the corsairs come over the rail off the Isles of Zora, Philemon is sixty-one years old and has never held an axe in his life. He calls on the red planet, snatches up a boarding axe from a fallen deckhand, and suddenly his feet know where to go. The blade bites where he means it to, a little harder than it should. For a few breathless minutes the ship's astrologer fights like a veteran marine. Then the fire leaves his arms, and he sits down heavily on a coil of rope.

The Aesir war chief on the beach at Haloga has already drawn his axe when the Atlantean mage steps forward and speaks, in the chief's own tongue, with the slow turns of phrase his grandmothers used around the winter fire. Elara quotes no proverb she knows; she simply finds the right words as she needs them. The giant's shoulders loosen. His warriors glance at each other. For the next hour the talk is of trade in amber and furs, not of whose blood will stain the shingle.

Three days into the weed of the Sargasso Sea the fog is so thick the lookout cannot see the bowsprit, and the captain has stopped pretending he knows where the ship is pointing. Kallias, a passenger with ink-stained fingers and an astrologer's ring, climbs to the quarterdeck, closes his eyes and speaks a short phrase to stars he cannot see. Then he lays his hand flat on the rail. We are facing north-north-east, he says. The helmsman swears, spins the wheel, and the ship comes slowly about.

The tax collector in the Grand Marketplace of Acheron slaps the astrologer's scroll case to the ground and walks off laughing. Nefer watches him go, and murmurs to the sky. Over the following day the man steps in a pothole, loses a sandal to a camel, and has his purse lifted twice by the same small boy. Every beggar and drunk in the city seems to find him. He loses a fortune at knucklebones, and his most sincere apology to his wife somehow comes out as an insult.

A Zephyr lands on the ledge above the Mu cliff road, wings half spread, a long spear across her back. Taro, the caravan's Druas mage, looks up and quietly reads her from eighty feet below. Hostile, the spell tells him, cold and certain. He signals the drovers to keep their hands away from their bows and sends up a gift of salt and fine thread on a rope. When he reads her again after she has hauled it in, the answer has changed to neutral. It is enough to pass.

The enchantress at the Tartessian court smiles her famous smile and asks the royal astrologer, very sweetly, whether he would like to tell her everything the king said this morning. Adonibaal feels the magic wash over him like warm surf and simply stands there, feet planted, mind as fixed as a bull in a field. He would not, he says. She tries again, harder, and frowns. For as long as the spell holds, nothing she whispers will move him, and he bows himself out long before it wears off.

The Ghost City lies on the sea floor northeast of Attalus, and the Triton guides will go no further than its first ruined wall. The mage Orestes, breathing the sea by the grace of the water sign, speaks to the stars above the surface and opens his eyes wide. The empty streets are suddenly crowded. Pale sailors stand guard on the rotting hulks still chained at the moorings, and a drowned harbor clerk drifts past, counting cargoes that no longer exist. Orestes has only minutes of sight. He counts the guards quickly.

The prize leopard at the Acheron Zoo has stopped eating, and the keeper is certain someone has poisoned it. Sennefer the astrologer kneels by the bars and asks for the animal's forepaw, which two keepers hold out to him with great care. He studies the pads and the curve of the claws for a long minute, humming to himself, while the leopard glares. Not poison, he says at last, standing and dusting off his robe. Worms. Send for the physician, not the magistrate.

The manticore drops onto the road outside Kush with its tail of spines rattling, and young Obi, the only spearman left standing, starts to back away with his knees shaking. The mage Amani calls out the lion's sign and flings her hand toward him. The trembling stops in mid-step. For the next several minutes Obi feels no fear at all, not of the spines, not of the teeth, not of the sickening wet voice. He plants his spear and waits for the monster to come.

The dealer in Tartessos swears the circlet came from a First Age tomb in Autochthea and that it is worth a king's ransom. Asherah, a mage who has bought trouble before, asks him to set it on the counter and step back. She speaks softly to the evening star and looks. The circlet sits within arm's reach, dull gold and pretty, and it is cursed. What the curse does, the spell will not say: madness, bad luck, a slow death. She pushes it back across the counter without a word.

At the Palace of Harmony in Tang the banquet has reached its ninth course, and the imperial astrologer Wei Lan has not touched a thing. She murmurs over her folded hands as the servants pour the plum wine. Within the span of her little circle, her senses snag on one cup only, the one being set before the visiting envoy from Meluhha. She rises, apologizes for her clumsiness, and knocks it into his lap. The envoy is furious. He will thank her in the morning.

The necromancer on the ridge above Taranta finishes his chant, and something with too many teeth pulls itself out of the smoke and lopes toward the mage. Iason raises a hand and speaks the name of the greatest planet. The fiend strikes an invisible line ten feet from him and stops, snarling, pacing back and forth as if chained. It cannot come nearer. The necromancer's two hired swordsmen, who were never summoned by anyone, walk straight through the line. Iason draws his dagger.

Captain Brannoc of the Ys harbor guard has hated Deri the Druas mage on sight for a decade, and he is walking over now with his hand on his sword. Deri whispers the planet's name and chooses carefully. The captain slows, stops, and looks at the Druas with an expression of mild, puzzled indifference. He has no reason to arrest her. He has no reason to help her either. He wanders away. Each dawn he may shake the feeling off. Deri plans to be gone by then.

The sorcerer's grimoire lies open on a reading stand in the Tang University Complex for exactly as long as it takes the librarian to sneeze. Zhou Min, a mage of middling rank and excellent timing, glances across four pages of cramped, foreign script and closes his eyes. He cannot read a word of it, but the pages sit in his mind as sharp as a fresh print. On the walk home his friend asks what he saw. Zhou says nothing at all until he has ink, paper and a locked door.

In the dusty back room of the Philosopher's Stone, the mage Kyra breathes on a lump of rock crystal the size of a fist and wipes it with her sleeve. The first face she seeks surfaces in the facets: the runaway apprentice, somewhere north, a day's ride away, in a pine forest. Then the stolen horse, stabled not two miles off. Then her brother, far over the sea, at a crowded quayside. After a few minutes the crystal goes back to being a lump of rock.

The ferry across the Okawala River should be safe; people use it every day. Still, Kwame the astrologer mutters a few words as he steps aboard, and at once his skin prickles. Something ahead and to the left, perhaps sixty feet, means him harm. He cannot tell what. He stares at the brown water, at the reeds, at the ferryman's broad smiling face. Then, with great politeness, he steps back onto the bank and decides he will walk the long way round.

By the time the fire bells ring, the Gryphon Warehouse in Atlantis is roaring from end to end, and the flames are leaping for the barges moored along the canal. Callisto the mage pushes through the bucket line, draws the triangle of the fire sign in the air and speaks it aloud. The blaze does not dwindle. It simply goes out, all of it, in one breath, leaving a hundred feet of charred timber ticking and steaming in sudden silence. The bucket line stands there, dripping, and stares at her.

The young hippocampus is tangled in a net off Antilla, thrashing so hard the fishermen dare not come near with their knives. Dione, the ship's astrologer, leans over the side and reaches out with the planet's gift, not in words but in feeling. Panic floods back at her, and pain, and a fierce longing for its mother in the deep water. She sends back calm, and patience, and a promise. Slowly the creature stills, and lets the men cut it free without a single kick.

The king cobra strikes out of the leaf litter in the Black Jungle, and the porter Ranjit goes down clutching his calf, his face already gray. Priya, the expedition's astrologer, drops to her knees beside him and lays both hands on the swelling wound. She speaks the name of the virgin sign and feels the influence pass through her palms. The venom simply stops working. The pain lingers, and Ranjit weeps from fright, but his breathing steadies and his color slowly returns.

The bouncer at a dockside tavern in Tartessos is a Netherman built like a door, and he does not care that the little mage in the corner has paid for her wine. He swings a fist. Ilana has just finished tracing the scales on the tabletop, and when the blow lands on her cheek, the Netherman reels back clutching his own face, lip split in exactly the same place as hers. He stares at her. He tries again, and again gets exactly what he gives. Then he fetches a friend with a crossbow.

The Pictish arrows come out of the heather in a black flight, and Gwion, the mage walking at the back of the column, has only a moment to draw the ringed planet's sign across his chest. The air around him stiffens like a second skin. An arrow takes him in the shoulder but sinks barely half as deep as it should, and a sling stone that ought to have cracked his skull leaves only a bruise. He does not run, but walks steadily on toward the cover of the cairn.

The fishermen of Elassippea say the sunken city of Attla still gleams with orichalc, and the astrologer Ianthe means to see for herself. At the edge of the Sea of Lost Souls she speaks the water sign, takes a deep breath, and steps off the boat. The breath never runs out. She draws the sea in and out as easily as air and swims down through the green gloom toward the drowned towers. She has several hours before she must come up, and she intends to use every one of them.

Twenty goblins are pouring across a rope bridge in the Daraka Mountains when Tendai, the caravan's mage, spins a ball of screaming wind between her palms and hurls it into the middle of them. It bursts like a thunderclap. Goblins fly in every direction, tumbling over the planks and into each other, and most lie where they fall, too dazed to rise. One small, quick goblin ducks under the blast, shakes his head, and keeps coming. Tendai reaches, somewhat wearily, for her knife.

The corsairs of the Isles of Zora have tied the mage Pallas to the mast and are dividing the spoils around a chest of Atlantean coin. That is their mistake. Pallas speaks the scorpion's sign under his breath, and greed spreads outward from him like a stain. Within moments every pirate near the chest is shouting that it is his, and his alone. Knives come out. Only the cabin boy, frowning, seems untouched, and he quietly begins untying the ropes while his elders bleed.

In the steaming jungle of Amphisea, the expedition's healer is down with fever and their medicine chest is empty. Mehmet the astrologer kneels in the mud and studies a curling gray vine on a tree across the clearing, lips moving, for a long minute while the mosquitoes feast on his neck. Then the knowledge settles in. The vine's sap will bring the fever down, but its roots will kill a man by nightfall. He calls for a bowl and a knife, and warns everyone twice about the roots.

The dungeons beneath the Citadel of Tok are cut into solid rock, and the guards laughed when they left the Druas mage chained only at the ankle. Isra waits until the torchlight fades, then speaks the earth sign and lays her palm against the far wall. The stone groans and gives way, not in rubble but in a clean square passage, ten feet high and ten feet deep, opening onto a slope of cold starlit grass. She has no tools for the chain, so she drags it with her.

The Royal Palace in Acheron has four gates, forty guards and a Pharaoh's wizard on the rooftop. Tiye the mage walks past all of them. She holds the moon's name in her mind like a full cup of water, not spilling a drop, and nothing can see her, not the guards, not the hounds, not the wizard's scrying glass. She passes within a hand's breadth of the captain. Then a peacock screams, she flinches, the cup spills, and she is standing, suddenly visible, in a corridor full of astonished servants.

The Rock Trolls come up the mountain pass at dusk, when the light is weakest. Torvald, an astrologer and the only human among the dwarves of Ironhold, climbs onto a boulder and speaks the sun's high name, and becomes the sun. A blaze of white light fills the pass for twenty feet around him. The dwarves who looked away curse and blink; one who turned to gape is left stumbling blind. The trolls howl, clutch their faces and flee downhill, those who are slow losing their sight for ever.

In the Institute of Knowledge, beside the canals of Atlantis, the archimage Theodora lays her hands on the orichalc staff brought up from Attla. She has thought about the question for three nights and phrases it with a lawyer's care: what word awakens the staff's power, and what does that power do. The answer comes not as a voice but as a memory that is not hers, of a First Age priest on a burning quay, speaking a single syllable. Theodora writes it down, and does not say it aloud.

The warehouse clerk in Sheba has told the same smooth story four times, and the merchant who hired Yusuf is losing patience. The astrologer sits down across from the clerk, draws the archer's sign on the table with a wet finger, and asks one question only. Where are the forty bales of saffron? The clerk opens his mouth to lie, and the truth falls out instead: sold, in the night, to a ship bound for Tartessos. He clamps a hand over his mouth. Yusuf gets no second question, and needs none.

Smoke is rising over the walls of Mehedra when the mage Aristea raises her arms on the citadel roof and calls down the sun's chariot. It comes blazing out of the clouds, drawn by four winged horses of light. Five wounded officers pile in beside her. One of them, a hot-blooded young tribune, grabs the reins and tries to wheel the steeds toward the Netherman siege lines. They will not turn. Only when Aristea says home do they bank east, and carry everyone to safety across the water.

In a cellar under the Hesperian Quarter, five conspirators wait while Sabinus, an old astrologer, spends a long hour on his knees chalking a circle fourteen feet across, crowded with the signs of the twelve houses. When the last mark is done he sits back, sweating. Inside the ring no crystal or scrying eye can find them. They lean close and talk treason for most of the night, until the innkeeper's cat saunters in, walks across the chalk, and smudges Capricorn with one fat paw. Everyone stops talking.

The lighthouse keeper at the Pharos lost his sight in a flash of sorcerous fire three winters ago and has tended his great lamp by feel ever since. Khafra the mage comes to him at dawn, lays two fingers gently on the old man's eyelids, and speaks the sign of the goat. For a long moment nothing happens. Then the keeper cries out and turns his face, blinking and weeping, toward the pale light on the harbor, the ships, and the birds wheeling over the breakwater.

The raiders who scale the hill at Klymeus expect scholars, not a fight. The archimage Demetrios, who has spent forty years measuring the planets in the observatory there, snatches a spear from a fallen guard and calls on the red star in its full strength. What follows is brief and ugly. He moves like a veteran of twenty wars, striking twice as often as any man around him, and every blow lands hard. When the red light fades from his eyes, three raiders lie on the steps and the rest are running.

The crowd in the Public Square of Acheron has been shouting for the grain merchant's blood for an hour, and the city watch is badly outnumbered. The mage Hapuseneb steps out among the nearest rioters and releases the planet's power in a wave. Within twenty feet of him, angry faces soften. Men who were brandishing clubs begin to laugh, then to embrace each other, overcome with a joy they cannot explain. One scowling rioter feels nothing at all, but he is alone now, and he slinks away.

The cell in the prison of Tartessos has walls a good ten feet thick, and Philia the mage has only a minute once the spell takes hold. She shoulders her pack, nods to her cellmate, the honest thief who shared his bread with her, and walks into the stone as if it were morning mist. He grabs her sleeve and is left holding nothing. On the far side she stumbles out into the alley, gasping. She will be back for him with the proper keys, she promises the wall.

Something has been taking goats at the edge of the Ngani Swamp, and the villagers are too frightened to go and look. Laiana, an astrologer from Mu, stands on a stilted walkway and studies the hunched shape among the reeds, perhaps eighty feet away, for a full minute while the flies drone. The answer comes: a swamp troll, very strong, hungry and hostile. She lowers her eyes, walks back to the headman and tells him to move the goats, the children and the village, in that order.

The hilltop at Stonehenge is empty except for four travelers holding hands inside the ring of great stones, trying not to look nervous. Morwen, a mage of long years and considerable power, finishes the last line of the invocation and draws a star in the frosty air. The world folds. The stones, the grass, the cold wind of Alba all vanish at once, and the four of them are standing in an endless silver haze, weightless, on the astral plane, with nothing underfoot at all.

The caravan vanished between two wells somewhere in the desert southwest of Acheron, forty camels and all their drivers, and the family wants answers. Amenemhat, a mage of the Institute of Astrology, walks out onto the dunes at the edge of the old route and fixes his gaze on a single great ridge of sand. He asks one question: what became of the caravan that passed through here? The dune answers. A storm buried them where they sheltered. They lie twenty feet beneath his sandals.

The necromancer's winged demon has already torn the roof off the granary at Zarzis when Lykos the mage reaches the square below it. He does not bother with fire or ice. He points one finger up at the shrieking thing, which hangs less than a hundred feet above him, and speaks the full name of the king of planets. There is no struggle and no contest. The demon simply is not there any more, sent home in the middle of a wingbeat, and a few loose shingles patter down into the silence.

The firedrake comes down on the high pass in Draconea with the sun behind it, and there is nowhere to run. Arkadios the mage gathers the other six into a tight knot and speaks the ringed planet's greatest name. An unseen globe closes around them. Flame washes over it, and claws, and a lashing tail, and none of it gets through. Inside, the seven stand pressed shoulder to shoulder, unable to cast so much as a spark, unable to step out, counting the minutes and hoping the dragon grows bored.

The crown of the last lord of Chu Tang went into Baykal Lake a century ago, when his barge overturned in a storm, and a dozen divers have died looking for it. Ma Lin, an astrologer of the State Observatory, rows out alone to the spot where the old songs say the barge went down, lays her palm on the cold water, and asks the lake a single question. Where does the crown lie now? The answer surfaces slowly in her mind: under the ribs of the barge, in the soft black silt.

On the highest terrace of the State Astrological Observatory in Tang, the old astrologer Liu Shen asks the stars about the young prince's journey south. The vision takes him hard. He sees a river running red with lanterns, a white tiger asleep in a boat, a bridge of reeds that holds the weight of an army, and the prince older, laughing, with a scar across his cheek. Some of it is plain; some is riddle. All of it, Liu Shen knows with cold certainty, will happen exactly as he saw it.

The boy has been pulled from the Canals of Atlantis cold and blue, and the crowd on the bridge has already begun to wail. Aglaea, an astrologer who happened to be passing, pushes through and counts on her fingers: he went into the water less than an hour ago. She kneels, draws the twin fish on his chest with her own wet thumb, and speaks to the stars. The boy coughs up half the canal. He is white, trembling and barely able to lift his head, but he is alive.